This study explores the drivers of site selection amongst livestock owners under conditions of increasing animal numbers following a low point in the 1990s. Our major goal was to understand whether livestock owners are acting as 'optimal foragers,' targeting areas of highest forage availability as they colonise previously empty areas. The results presented here suggest that they do not. Initial...

Though theory predicts consistency of warning signals in aposematic species to facilitate predator learning, variation in these signals often occurs in nature. The strawberry poison frog Dendrobates pumilio is an exceptionally polytypic (populations are phenotypically distinct) aposematic frog exhibiting variation in warning color and brightness. In the Solarte population, males and females bot...

A well-established phenomenon in the study of attention is the attentional blink-a deficit in reporting the second of two targets when it occurs 200-500 msec after the first. Although the effect has been shown to be robust in a variety of task conditions, not every individual participant shows the effect. We measured electroencephalographic activity for "nonblinkers" and "blinkers" during execu...

The goal of TDT Topic Detection and Tracking is to develop automatic methods of identifying topically related stories within a stream of news media. We describe approaches for both detection and tracking based on the well-known idf -weighted cosine coefficient similarity metric. The surprising outcome of this research is that we achieved very competitive results for tracking using a very simple...

In the design of complex systems serving a broad group of stakeholders, it can be difficult to prioritize objectives for the architecture. We postulate that it is possible to make architectural decisions based on consideration of stakeholder value delivery. We introduce the concept of using network models linked to architecture models to investigate value delivery. These models are used to exam...

Feature selection techniques have been used as the workhorse in biomarker discovery applications for a long time. Surprisingly, the stability of feature selection with respect to sampling variations has long been under-considered. It is only until recently that this issue has received more and more attention. In this article, we review existing stable feature selection methods for biomarker dis...

Consistency modeling for gene selection is a new topic emerging from our recent cancer bioinformatics research. We found that the result of classification or clustering on a training set was often quite different compared to using a testing set. Here, we address this as a consistency problem. In practice, the inconsistency of microarray datasets prevents many typical gene selection methods work...

This investigation is about the cultural, social, and legal factors influencing on the amount of dowry. Hence, we used structuralism theory, functionalism, symbolic interactionism, and reasonable selection, theory of mass society and media power and religiosity theory. Therefore, for this topic we examined cluster random sampling of the 384 married men and women of 18 to 35 years in Qom. The re...

Amino acids (AA) are important in poultry nutrition not only for protein deposition, but also for other metabolic functions; such as improving immune and gut functions. Although, some table values are available on amino acids requirement, AA requirements may vary due to changes in dietary composition and breeding selection. Thus amino acids requirements have remained an ongoing research topic. ...

Automatic signal type identification (ASTI) is an important topic for both the civilian and military domains. Most of the proposed identifiers can only recognize a few types of digital signal and usually need high levels of SNRs. This paper presents a new high efficient technique that includes a variety of digital signal types. In this technique, a combination of higher order moments and hi...